The Courage Performance Blog

Sometime the strangest things inspire the deepest thoughts on me. For example, I’ve started listening to comedy clips on Pandora as I do things around the gym, or run errands, and a clip from a pretty hysterical guy, Joe Rogan came on. He was on a roll about how useless all of us are in the sense that pretty much all of us have no clue how things work. Like the computer/phone/tablet that you are most likely reading this on; do you have any clue at all how all of it works? Most of us have no idea. As I type this out, how the heck are letters appearing on a perfectly lit screen as I smack them with my fingers. Just take a moment and think about that, we rely SO much on things some smart person out there invented so our lives can be a little easier. And thanks to this we all become a little more useless and lazy every day. So, the way my brain works, I immediately got lost in my mind thinking about what it actually means to actually live. And I was brought back to being out in the woods like I always talk about, and how important it is in my opinion. Taking a break from all these creations we’ve all decided to rely on really hits you, like really hard. When you have no phone, camera, car, air conditioning/heat, TV, bike, watch, you get the point here, you are left with only two things: your body, and your mind. If you want food, you have to create ways using your mind, and things you find naturally occurring in the wild to get fuel. If you want warmth and shelter, you must build and create from complete scratch. If you can’t handle being alone with your thoughts, you have no radio, TV, video games, or interwebs to distract you from yourself. All you can do is get out there and figure it out. And then reality hits each and every one of us. Could you do this? I mean seriously. So many people I know can’t handle their power going out for more than a few hours. A couple years back the power went out in the DC area for like 3 days and people were moving into hotels and such because they couldn’t handle it. For real, big houses and apartments, all filled with comfy, luxurious things we all “need”, abandoned because there was nothing happened when you flipped the light switch. Cars worked, hotels, generators, cell phones, plenty of stores filled with food to buy and air conditioning to hang out in (the malls were packed all day with people just hanging out). But people were so thrown off. It was like the world had ended. Could any of these people survive more than a day or two with absolutely nothing? Build their own shelter, create their own warmth, find their own food, know how not to die? And I’m not talking about just living minimally out in the wild in a fancy cabin with a bed and sofa and sink and bathroom. I’m not talking about having a gun on the wall to go hunting for food that you can then cook in your kitchen in your cabin. What happens when the gun someone else built, and the bullets someone else made run out and break down? What happens when your generator runs out and your fridge won’t work and your lights won’t turn on? How long could you survive? Now, I’m not proposing that we should not enjoy and indulge in all these wonderful things so many smart people have created for us to make our lives so much better. All I’m trying to bring up is that such a large reliance on these indulgences makes us weaker and weaker each and every day. If you can watch TV while also knowing that it would be incredibly easy to be in the woods with no screens at all for at least 24 hours, then cool, watch your TV (I’m watching a show on my iPad as I type this!). My issue is not that we have, use, and enjoy so many incredible inventions. My issue is that so many have no clue how to live without them. And worse yet, would actually not be able to survive without them. This coming weekend I am testing out a project I came up with a long while ago with an old friend of mine. I hope to create a program out of it to help people understand what it means to be a human in the natural world. While there are lots of details to this that I’ll share at a later time, I am basically going to head out into the woods with nothing but the clothes I’m wearing and a rugged blanket, and I’ll just sit out there for a minimum of 12 hours. The goal is to completely and totally reconnect with Mother Nature. No distractions, no help or assistance, just me and the wild. I can’t wait! Never Stop, GET FIT. Josh Courage

I like it. A quote from one of my favorite authors, Jim Harrison, the book is Julip:
“He went to college and played football, I hear. Then he read a few books and is trying to go native. He likes to get in fights and thrown in jail in order to have genuine experiences. It’s our times that cause people to act this way.” This notion transcended that of imminent danger to B.D. He liked the surprises offered by odd behavior himself and remembered waking early one morning a couple of summers before when he was supposed to help Frank, the owner of the Dunes Saloon, roof his house. Instead, he ate a can of beans and walked in a straight line for eighteen miles, over hill and dale, through gullies and creeks, skirting tamarack swamps, to a hummock he liked near the roots of the Two Hearted River. He carried a giant Hefty bag folded in his pocket for instant shelter, on the advice of old Claude, a Chippewa herbalist. At dark he drank a lot of cold spring water, climbed into the bag, and watched the first full moon in August out the hole near the drawstring, smoking an occasional cigarette to keep out mosquitoes. Before dawn he poked a hole and peed right out of the garbage bag.

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